​​Following the damning Chilcot report, much will be said about the decision to go to war in Iraq. But one thing will be missing: the information I leaked in the runup to the war. It won’t get an airing because I was never questioned or asked to participate in the Chilcot inquiry.

Back in early 2003, Tony Blair was keen to secure UN backing for a resolution that would authorise the use of force against Iraq. I was a linguist and analyst at GCHQ when, on 31 Jan 2003, I, along with dozens of others in GCHQ, received an email from a senior official at the National Security Agency. \

​It said the agency was “mounting a surge particularly directed at the UN security council (UNSC) members”, and that it wanted “the whole gamut of information that could give US policymakers an edge in obtaining results favourable to US goals or to head off surprises”.

In other words, the US planned to use intercepted communications of the security council delegates. The focus of the “surge” was principally directed at the six swing nations then on the UNSC: Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Bulgaria, Guinea and Pakistan. The Chilcot report has eliminated an​y doubt that the goal of the war was regime change by military means. But that is what many people already suspected in 2003.

Philip Hammond says decision to remove supporters of Ba’ath party from army was biggest mistake of post-conflict planning.

The UK has stepped up its criticism of US conduct of the Iraq war, with the foreign secretary saying the single most disastrous mistake was the mass removal of supporters of the Ba’ath party from the Iraqi army, which he claimed led directly to the formation of Islamic State.

Philip Hammond said the move by Paul Bremer, an American diplomat in charge of running Iraq in 2003, to dismantle the country’s army had proved a disastrous mistake, as it had sent 400,000 unemployed soldiers on to the streets.

On Thursday the Chilcot report on the UK’s involvement in Iraq delivered a scathing critique of Tony Blair’s decision to go to war on the basis of bogus intelligence and a catastrophic lack of planning for the aftermath of the invasion.

An Iraqi woman who lived in Baghdad through the entire Iraq War has described her family’s hope turning to horror as the city descended into chaos.

The woman, who can only be identified as NM because of fears for her safety, was a 24-year-old student when American and British forces launched their invasion in March 2003.

​Two days after she handed in her master’s thesis, “Operation Iraqi Freedom” started and thousands of troops entered the country to topple Saddam Hussein.

While most of Baghdad’s civilians fled the capital, NM’s family decided to stay in their home expecting a short air campaign like the one they withstood in the Gulf War.

Most agree it is the families of British servicemen and women killed in the Iraq war who have waited the longest.

When John Chilcot appears before television cameras on Wednesday morning, it will have been 2,578 days, or just over seven years, since the retired civil servant was announced as the head of an inquiry into Britain’s involvement in the U.S.-led Iraq war.

The families, many of whom will be in the Queen Elizabeth II Centre in central London listening to Chilcot disclose his findings, have been waiting for some measure of accountability since the invasion to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime.

They are the relatives of 179 British soldiers who died in action between March 2003 and April 2009, when the last U.K. troops were withdrawn from Iraq. Nearly 50 were killed by roadside bombs after the initial combat mission. The number of Iraqi deaths over the same period is counted in tens of thousands.

After seven years, the Chilcot report has delivered a damning verdict on Tony Blair’s role in the war on Iraq, but British Prime Ministers playing a destructive role in Iraq is a centuries old practice.

Britain has used its military might and commercial prowess to subjugate Iraq and control its oil resources for over one hundred years.

Churchill invented Iraq. The end of World War I left Britain and France in command of the Middle East and the allies carved up the region as the defeated Ottoman Empire fell apart. Winston Churchill convened the 1912 Conference in Cairo to determine the boundaries of the British Middle Eastern mandate. After giving Jordan to Prince Abdullah, Churchill, gave Prince Abdullah’s brother Faisal an arbitrary patch of desert that became Iraq.

Historian Michael R. Burch recalls how the huge zigzag in Jordan’s eastern border with Saudi Arabia has been called “Winston’s Hiccup” or “Churchill’s Sneeze” because Churchill carelessly drew the expansive boundary after a generous lunch.

Iraq is awash with daily atrocities, with the Islamic State (ISIL) reportedly burying people alive, drowning people in submerged cages, detonating explosives around victims’ necks, and shooting its own members trying to defect. The group has murdered thousands, including up to 1,700 Shia military cadets in Tikrit in June 2014.

​The response of Iraq, and much of the world, has been to fight ISIL on the battlefield, at huge cost — not only in combat deaths of the largely volunteer fighters, but also to local populations that these fighters abuse after freeing them from ISIL.

ISIL has shown its disregard for the laws of armed conflict that are meant to protect civilians, but Iraq’s anti-ISIL forces are no more accountable to international standards. It is high time for Iraq to establish better mechanisms to hold its own forces to account, not only to protect the civilian population, but also to ensure that new abuses do not breed resentment feeding a resurgence of ISIL-like groups.

As the Iraqi military moves to retake Fallujah from ISIL with support from volunteer militias and ahead of the offensive to dislodge ISIL from Mosul, the Iraqi government and the US-led anti-ISIL coalition should also press for accountability for Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) — the name for the largely Shia volunteer forces.

​​Iraqi authorities must rein in all forces participating in the recapture of Falluja said Amnesty International today, amid reports that men and boys fleeing the armed group calling itself Islamic State (IS) had been tortured and otherwise ill-treated by government-backed militias and at least three had died as a result of torture.

Amnesty International has spoken to victims who described the torture and other ill-treatment meted out to them in detention and who claim to have witnessed killings.

“Civilians risking their lives to escape from IS atrocities must be protected and given the humanitarian aid they desperately need. Instead it seems that some are having to run the gauntlet of being subjected to further abuse and reprisal attacks,” said Philip Luther, Director of Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Programme.

Civilians risking their lives to escape from IS atrocities must be protected and given the humanitarian aid they desperately need. Instead it seems that some are having to run the gauntlet of being subjected to further abuse and reprisal attacks.

Tony Blair is damned. We have seen establishment whitewashes in the past: from Bloody Sunday to Hillsborough, officialdom has repeatedly conspired to smother truth in the interests of the powerful. But not this time. The Chilcot inquiry was becoming a satirical byword for taking farcically long to execute a task; but Sir John will surely go down in history for delivering the most comprehensively devastating verdict on any modern prime minister.

Those of us who marched against the Iraq calamity can feel no vindication, only misery that we failed to prevent a disaster that robbed hundreds of thousands of lives – those of 179 British soldiers among them – and which injured, traumatised and displaced millions of people: a disaster that bred extremism on a catastrophic scale.

One legacy of Chilcot should be to encourage us to be bolder in challenging authority, in being sceptical of official claims, in standing firm against an aggressive agenda spun by the media. Lessons must be learned, the war’s supporters will now declare. Don’t let them get away with it. The lessons were obvious to many of us before the bombs started falling.

(Beirut) – An Iraqi government investigation into alleged abuses against civilians during military operations to retake Fallujah is being kept under wraps. New reports of serious abuses by the Popular Mobilization Forces and Federal Police compound the summary killings, enforced disappearances, and torture reported since the beginning of the operation, which Human Rights Watch documented.

​On June 4, 2016, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi opened an investigation into allegations of abuse and three days laterannounced unspecified arrests and the “transfer of those accused of committing violations to the judiciary to receive their punishment according to the law.” Government officials, however, have not provided information in response to Human Rights Watch inquiries since mid-June about the status of the investigation, who is conducting it, or steps taken so far.

“Failing to hold fighters and commanders accountable for grave abuses bodes very badly for the looming battle for Mosul,” said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director. “Serious investigations and prosecutions are essential to provide justice to victims and their families, and to deter atrocities by government forces.”

Human Rights Watch directed its questions about the investigation to spokespersons for the prime minister and the judiciary. Human Rights Watch also spoke with members of parliament, the judiciary, a local official in Anbar province, government human rights officials as well as foreign and United Nations diplomats. None could provide any information about the purported investigations, including whether anyone has been arrested and charged.

MEE columnist Peter Oborne says Iraq Inquiry leaves former PM Tony Blair without a 'leg to stand on' and is 'pregnant with significance'.

He said it did not leave Blair with a "leg to stand on", was "brutal" on the security services, and "pregnant with significance for the British state because something clearly went significantly wrong."
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"He has fundamentally gone to the heart of the matter, he's shown that Mr Blair's government took Britain into an unnecessary war," said Oborne, speaking after journalists had seen the report for the first time.

​"It was a war, and Sir John Chilcot makes no bones about this, that led to the most terrible and devastating consequences.